Halloween Props: Pie of Sauron

[Richard] combined creative carving with vacuum tube electronics for a unique pumpkin offering. He used the stencil-and-cut method of carving, making use of an inexpensive carving kit for great results. He salvaged an LED module from a flashlight to provide the internal illumination, but it’s the center feature that we like the best. [Richard’s] used a glow-transfer counting tube, or dekatron, which provides something like a circular cylon eye to the project. There’s a video of this after the break.

You might not have access to a wicked-looking dekatron but we’re guessing you’ve got a microcontroller and some LEDs lying around that can serve as a stand-in for one night. We’d love to do a reader jack-o-lantern roundup, so if you build something, send us a picture!

12 thoughts on “Halloween Props: Pie of Sauron”

Hmmm, it looks kindof dumb. The carving looks cool, but the tube in the center doesn’t really add much to it. It would have been cooler to have led’s embedded throughout the carving and have them glow in a sequence going out from the center or something…